Toryanse Dance Remixes

Before listening to these remixes, watch the video below to hear the usual interpretation of “Toryanse“, the traditional Japanese children’s melody played at pedestrian traffic crossings all over Japan:

This morning I flashed back to 2006 when video game maker Konami hired me to compose a dance remix of Toryanse for their Xbox release of Dance Dance Revolution. Did you listen to the melody in that video above? It is plain eerie – a definite timewarp into feudal japanese history – and making it danceable at all was a huge challenge.

All in all I think I went through 13 rounds of remixes back and forth before Konami finally settled on a techno genre tempo-warping version of the melody. Here’s an early draft version of the final mix (to which Konami still has exclusive rights):

Toryanse Techno Mix

While digging through my files this morning, I rediscovered three completely different remixes I composed that Konami didn’t like. I’m releasing the following three tracks under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This means you can do almost anything you like with these songs — download them, remix them, mash them up, extend them, even sell them — provided that you give me credit and link back to this website.